Adding to the Plant Collection

Great activity in the walled gardens and woodlands these days. If you go into the woods you will see the first pieces of sculpture for the Roscommon Schools Sculpture Competition. Some really interesting pieces of art. The competition will open for voting from the June Bank Holiday weekend. Our new trees have started to come into leaf which is great (the rain will help this). The rare plant sale was on last week the perfect opportunity to feed an addiction for plants. Got some really interesting ferns for the woodlands going to plant these today. Also going to give an Echium another go, have never succeeded in getting these through the Winter in Roscommon, also going to plant a Japanese Black Pine (Pinus thunbergii) outside of the Walled Garden. In the vegetable garden it is still a little too cold to plant out a lot of things but hopefully within the next week this will change. The Herbaceous border is starting to show off as you can see from the photo Monks hood is such a great plant for colour at this time of year. The new exhibition in Strokestown Park is “More than Meets the Eye, the photographic glass plates of Strokestown Park” and it features some early images of the walled garden and one of the Deer-park with deer grazing. Red Squirrels are spreading they have been spotted on the avenue coming in too.